Thoreau was the first hippy of America. Like many hippies, he never grew up. His legacy is an anti-Christian environmentalism, which has been slowly undermining America for the last 40 years.
Daniel Boone was naturalists that understood and appreciated nature. Thoreau was like a 10-year-old camping in the back yard, who discovers an earth worm and thinks they have just made a scientific discovery.
Only people as sheltered and naive as Thoreau find his epiphanies noteworthy.
It was a good novel worth reading several times over a lifetime. If he started his 2 year experiment at age 27 he had no desire for sex. That may be where we all fail. He had no desire to procreate.
Please....There were millions of people in our country doing the same thing.
I have no idea what teens this author is talking about, most teens today are brainwashed and conform to the liberalism they are taught.
“I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.”
Couldn’t stand him when I was a teen. Can’t stand him now.
Everyday something for the mind on FR. Now I have to go up to the attic and root out "Walden Pond". It is a paper back. Though very happy with the comfort of Edison's inventions of light and warmth (and my Mini-Van). I did like Thoreau.
His little accounts still stick in my mind. How the small creatures survive at Walden. Something else though. The English veteran of Waterloo, A Colonel Quoyle (I think). Found dead in his cottage and a pack of playing cards littered on the floor. The chickens pecking around and "awaiting a fox". Time had caught up with him, surviving wars.
One more. The great steam engine at a halt, like Boanerges, stilled by human hand. Patiently waiting for a command. Now I have to get his last work on his travels which may have been partly in Canada.
America lucky to have a Thoreau.
We are all “living in nature.”
Beavers build dams. Wolves have lairs. Herd animals have the herd. Etc.
When we build nuclear power plants, install automatic dishwashers, and truck in palettes of clothing, we are living in nature. That is our nature. It is as natural to the human race as the aerie is to the eagle.
In 1846, Thoreau visited Katahdin in Maine. True wilderness and woods. He didn't view it in the same light as his little cabin in the sunshine outside of Concord. He called it "grim and wild," "savage and dreary," fit only for "men nearer of kin to the rocks and wild animals than we."
Thoreau biographers Geral T. Blanchard and Roderick Nash say Thoreau was nearly hysterical from his experience with true wilderness.
Methinks I take pre-teen Scouts to places that would unnerve that man of the wilderness, Henry David Thoreau.
If there is a teenager still buried in me, that wasn’t
killed by Vietnam, failed marriage, drugs, alcohol, or
too many years of democrat domination, he better
get the hell out while he still can.
Thoreau was the King of the Backyard Campers; he walked a mile or two to the local lakeshore and recorded his observations there, when he wasn’t walking into town to get a little R&R from the “wilderness.”
As such, he’s been the model for and best friend of anti-social Nature dilettantes for more than a hundred years.
One is left to wonder, however, whether he might not have had the same piercing insights sitting on the back porch.
I speak to the buried teen in my back yard.
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